Building and presenting a good talk is not easy, whatever tools you use.Chalk, transparencies, slides, Powerpoint et. al. - done 'em all over the years.

The problem is learning to make a good presentation, not Powerpoint.Unfortunately Powerpoint makes it very easy to dress up a simple talkwirh all sorts of ridiculous fonts, bullets, swooping text, music clips and whatnotthat are completely unnecessary and distracting.

It doesn't have to be dull (in fact it shouldn't be) but informative and (a little) entertaining.

Powerpoint (or LibreOffice Presentation or Keynote) are very powerful tools forconveying information. Unfortunately they are usually very badly used.

Confirm Windows 7 affected. System fonts wouldn't display resulting in illegible system.Did a restore and then cautiously installed update one by one, with reboots in between each.Running OK nowSeems the problem was Windows installing all those updates in one big bunch.

The stupidity of ignoring nuclear fission never ceases to amaze me. Fusion is still a long way from practicality, will always expensive and isn't the clean dream - the massive neutron flux just makes even more radioactive waste. The oil & gas are going to run out one day, be it in 5 years or 50. Renewables are unreliable, expensive and the quantities of rare earths required make for horrible mining pollution as well as covering the landscape with ugly windmills and solar collectors.

High activity nuclear waste is a small volume storage problem and if we hadn't wasted the last 30 years we would have modern fission plant designs far safer than any of the chemical polluting shit we have now.

Following all this to it's logical conclusion, there is an excellent argument for allowing incestuous civil unions and the, following on from that, marriage.

After all, 20 of the States permit first cousin marriages and another six permit them under certain circumstances.

Why should not a brother and sister (or sister and sister, etc.) living together in a long term relationship be excluded from the benefits of marriage? There are hundreds of thousands of single men and women living monogamously with their mother or father for the long haul.

"Seymour Papert once had the right idea: you don't teach "programming", you teach structured thinking and analytical problem solving. "
Disagree. When I started programming as a kid 30 years ago BASIC taught ME structured thinking and analytical problem solving.
Mac

Yeah, I've noticed it in Cape Town too.
Bookstores are closing or downsizing. There are fewer serious books and more "bestsellers", chick-lit, and dumbed-down stuff.
I have fond memories of sitting at my stammtisch in my favourite cafe in the 60's reading French paperbacks and cutting the pages as I went.
Cutting the pages: a lost experience...
Ho hum.
Mac